Michael Jordan

I was happily watching my beloved basketball, and enjoying, yet all the while feeling old. I reminisce about the good old days. The bulls were winning 72 games, shorts had just gotten longer, the only tattoos were on Dennis “the Worm” Rodman, and Centres were lumbering lumpy giant dudes like Bill Cartwright and Rasho Nesterovic, with undefined arms and soft hands, like a baby’s bottom. It was a simpler time. You could be a geek, and still dominate the NBA, a la John Stockton, who was a millionaire, and never stopped getting his mom to cut his hair, apparently. The league, while being dominated by the likes of freaks like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, still had room for geeks to make their mark. Heck, the biggest geek of them all, the illustrious Larry Bird, the one lumpy to rule them all, still played in 1992. Is there space for Geeks in today’s league, or is there only to be athletic freaks from now on? Let’s take a look at a few from each column, and see if they fit the description, hmmm?

For one week this season, it feels like there are more stars returning from injury than ones getting hurt. However, that won’t console those who saw their players were added to the injury list. So we’ll start with the bad news first.

All-Star Jimmy Butler suffered an elbow sprain in Sunday’s game and will miss the next 3-6 weeks. Fortunately the injury will not require surgery, but that still puts him out for most, if not all of March.

Joining Derrick Rose and Butler on the sideline, Taj Gibson is out with another ankle injury. Out since suffering the injury in Friday’s game, he’s no longer wearing a walking boot. Gibson has a history of ankle injuries so the Bulls’ may want to be extra cautious with him, but Gibson should be considered day-to-day going forward.

Here it is, friends, the big kahuna. It’s like when your friends sit around and say, “what are your top 30 Arnold Schwarzenegger movies?” Only instead of that, it’s me telling you the top 100 basketball players for fantasy basketball purposes.

I love a good big man. That works in both a gay disco and a basketball court, which is basically on par for the amount of sweaty men grunting in close proximity to each other. As we continue our 2012-2013 fantasy basketball rankings, I am happy to hit the tallest of the tall.

Yeah, you caught me. You didn’t believe it because there aren’t any grizzly bears in Memphis. Look how smart you are! ESPN readers would have tweeted the headline without thinking. Now if the headline read “Gilbert Arenas Fights Grizzly Bear In Vancouver” then you totally would have believed it.

Sweet vindication! It was just a matter of time before Roy Tarpley – my evolutionary Jabbar – proved me right. 35/17/1, with a pair of steals, a pair of blocks and a sweet .652 from the field. If you rearrange Roy Tarpley, you can spell “breathtaking” (provided you also add and substitute a few letters not already found in the name Roy Tarpley).

The NBA’s 42nd season is all up in our collective faces; bigger and badder than ever – literally. The league has two more teams and those two teams look to give the Kings and Spurs a run for their total lack of money.

A few of you have sent me requests via U.S. mail for a post about draft pairings through the first two rounds. I planned on writing 1,500 words on the value of calling Alvin Robertson “Oscar” just to peeve him off, but it occurred to me that 1,470 of those words would probably be unprintable.

As the Lockout talks yielded fewer results than I would have liked over the weekend – and because it’s more painful to look toward the future on a day NBA training camps would normally be starting than to write about the past – I’ve instead begun preparing for a Razzball season filled with vintage fantasy basketball circa 1990.